Hokage's Shadow
by SasuNarufan13
Summary: They think the Hokage travelling alone makes an easy target. They really should think twice - and perhaps wonder why nobody has tried attacking him before. OC and Naruto's pov; slash; implied MPreg; description of wounds and gore; more warnings inside


**Author's note: This is a random idea I got after going through a doujinshi I bought a little while ago and as it wouldn't leave me alone, here it is: written in one sitting because my muse insisted on it. So if it doesn't make much sense, I blame the late hour *coughs***

**Warnings: OC pov and Naruto's pov at the end; set several years after the war; slash; implied MPreg; violence; description of fatal wounds and gore**

**Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto. Kishimoto owns it.**

**I hope you'll like it! (In spite of the potential weirdness)**

* * *

**Hokage's Shadow**

"So what do you think?" Gorou looked at them expectantly, his beady black eyes glinting.

"I'm not so sure about this," Hayato said, eyeing the scrolls spread open in front of their leader warily. In itself, the plan wasn't bad at all – how could it be when Gorou had devised it? The man was a genius – but it was their new target that made sweat break out in the back of his neck.

Attacking the Hokage? One of the main heroes of the Great War and the last remaining Jinchuuriki? Yeah, that didn't sound like a good idea to him. He very much liked being alive, thank you very much.

Kaito furrowed his heavy eyebrows and crossed his big arms. The metal cufflinks he wore gleamed faintly in the light of their campfire. "He's one of the main heroes of the war – why do you think he's going to be an easy catch? If that one group didn't succeed in it, why would we when we're with less people?"

"And the Akatsuki were hardly weak shinobi," Saburou added, still cleaning his jagged sword.

No matter which way Hayato looked at it, it resembled a jagged tooth of a shark more than an actual sword.

"In fact, I dare say they were one of the strongest," the purple haired man continued flatly. "No offence, but I don't fancy being killed by that Kage's guards or the man himself."

"You think I didn't do any reconnaissance beforehand?" Gorou raised an eyebrow; his large, imposing form throwing a long shadow across the sandy underground when he slowly rose up from the tree stump. "You simple minded idiot. If you'd paid any attention to what's going on in the world instead of keeping your face plastered against your sword, you would know that the Jinchuuriki doesn't travel with guards."

"That's impossible," their only female member, Kanae, retorted sharply. She was hidden in the shadows of the tree, seated on one of the higher branches. If Hayato squinted, he could just make out the tip of her shoe. "No Kage would ever travel without guards, let alone someone of his calibre and fame."

"I studied him for five months," Gorou said, tilting his head to the right. "Trust me, I was surprised too and I thought the first time was just a one off. But it's not. Whenever he leaves the village, he travels alone. No guards, no companions, nobody. He's the last remaining Jinchuuriki, but he's just one man. He can't defend himself against all five of us – especially when we attack at night." His grin resembled a shark and his eyes flickered eerily in the flames.

"I think you're underestimating him. If he travels alone, he'll be most certainly on his guard at night," she replied without missing a beat. "Even with all five of us, we might not make it out alive."

"That's where you're wrong, my dear Kanae," he chuckled, sounding almost fondly. "You know what else I discovered? _He doesn't kill_. Our war hero can't get himself to kill someone else, not even when they attack him. I've seen it with my own eyes. He defends himself when he's attacked, but he doesn't aim to kill – and that's going to be his downfall. Because unlike him, we won't have any trouble going all out."

Kaito nodded thoughtfully and Saburou started snickering, resting his sword next to him. Linking his hands behind his head, he licked his lips and murmured, "Well, when you put it like that, the plan is starting to sound more appealing."

"Think of what we can do with all that raw power," Gorou whispered, spreading out his arms. "Imagine what we can accomplish. We'll be able to rule the world; nobody will be able to stop us. That power is clearly wasted on that man – we're only doing him a service by taking it away. Nobody will be able to stop us." He looked around slowly, catching their gazes. "Who's in? Who wants to become more powerful?"

Hayato thought about it, about harnessing all that power, the great, raw power of a Bijuu. They would become one of the strongest in the world; nobody would dare to go against them. If he had all that power … He would no longer be that weak boy taunted by everyone in his year. His mother would no longer regard him with utter contempt and crushing disappointment.

People would have to start listening to him. Take him seriously. They would no longer be able to ignore him.

_Nobody would ever consider him inferior again._

His own bloodthirsty grin joined the others.

* * *

Gorou had found the scrolls in an abandoned cellar somewhere in the north. He'd stumbled upon them completely coincidental, as he'd been searching for shelter against the growing snow storm initially.

The scrolls had once belonged to the infamous Akatsuki group; a band of deserters with a plan to take control over the world by capturing all nine Bijuu. They had nearly succeeded, but a joined effort of the villages and a cooperation between the Jinchuuriki Uzumaki Naruto and the last Uchiha heir Uchiha Sasuke, had turned the tides in the end. Nearly all the Bijuu were freed, Uzumaki remained the only Jinchuuriki in existence, and peace was restored in the world.

All the Akatsuki members ended up dead, becoming nothing but a scary story for children at night and a bloody chapter in the shinobi history.

Hayato couldn't remember much of the war itself. He'd been hiding out in the desert when the war had started and then had somehow fallen into a coma for a while. When he'd regained consciousness again, the war had been over, Akatsuki had been wiped out, and Uchiha and Uzumaki were celebrated as _the_ heroes of the war. Uzumaki ended up becoming the new Hokage in Konoha and what became of Uchiha, nobody seemed to know for sure. Some said he was in hiding somewhere, having turned his back to the shinobi world after what had happened to his family. Others thought he was travelling the world – for what, they couldn't say.

Then there were ones who thought he'd died somewhere in the years after the war, but because he'd been in remote place, his body had yet to be found.

Hayato couldn't particularly care about what that Uchiha guy was doing or whether he was still alive. From the rumours he'd caught throughout the years, he counted himself lucky for not coming across the man. The stories people had to tell about him had been rather – gruesome and bloody at times.

With the war over, though, and the Akatsuki no longer existing, the feats they'd pulled in order to extract the Bijuu were forgotten, pushed aside. Nobody had expected the scrolls detailing the ritual the Akatsuki had used to be still around somewhere.

Until Gorou discovered them.

* * *

Gorou had – as he always did – worked out the plan in the smallest details, not allowing even the smallest opening for something to go wrong.

The Hokage was expected at a Kage meeting in Iwagakure in four days' time. As Gorou had told them, the Jinchuuriki was travelling on his own – a fact which made Hayato wonder just how dim the man actually was. Who in their right mind as a Kage would travel alone? Especially when on top of being an important person, you also carried a Bijuu? That man had to be either extremely dim-witted or simply mad.

His lone travel state, however, gave them the opportunity to put their plan in action. As the only one in the group being proficient at setting up rituals, Hayato had spent the last three weeks studying the scrolls thoroughly, memorising the set of jutsu required to call up the statue necessary to obtain the Bijuu. That alone wouldn't be enough, though. They weren't planning on collecting all the Bijuu – as that would be a time consuming and much too dangerous mission – and as the statue was designed to hold all nine Bijuu before releasing the amassed power, they needed something else in order to extract the Bijuu power from the statue itself.

He and Kanae had worked tirelessly throughout several long nights to devise a completely new ritual, one which would allow them to gather the Bijuu's power once the statue had absorbed it. It was a risky task as there was a chance of the ritual backfiring against them, but that chance was small, quite easily dismissible when compared to the high success rate their ritual would have.

Hayato would set up the ritual in a cave they'd selected for this purpose after having scouted the area two weeks earlier, while the rest of them would capture the Jinchuuriki. They couldn't kill him, because that would defeat their purpose of obtaining the beast inside of him, but that didn't mean he had to be captured in good health either. Knowing Gorou and Saburou in particular, chances were that the Hokage would arrive close to death anyway. As long as he stayed alive long enough to extract the beast, it didn't matter how violent they became.

If he wasn't so eager to attain that power, he would almost feel sorry for the Hokage. He would never want to go up against both Gorou and Saburou. Add in Kanae and Kaito …

That man was a goner, plain and simple. He just hoped they remembered on time that they had to hold themselves back at least a little bit.

A dead Jinchuuriki meant no Bijuu after all. He'd be pretty pissed off if he had spent all this time and energy in these rituals with nothing to show for it in the end.

Taking a step back, he studied the kanji he'd drawn on the ground with his own blood contemplatively before staring at the large empty space in front of him. For a brief moment he wondered whether they had done everything they needed to do for the statue to show up, whether they weren't missing something else, but then shook his head and wiped his hand clean on a handkerchief.

He'd followed the scrolls Gorou had given him to the last letter; of course the statue would appear once all preparations were final. Everything was proceeding according to the plan so far.

Now all he had to do was wait for his companions to return with their prize.

* * *

He didn't worry at first. Gorou had told him not to expect them back within the first three hours. Even he wasn't that arrogant to believe that the Hokage would let himself be captured that easily.

When the three hour window had come and gone, he just settled himself more comfortable against the right wall of the cave, figuring they were finishing up the fight.

The fourth hour passed with nobody showing up. Still, he thought he should give them some time. They were fighting against the famous Jinchuuriki of the Nine-tailed Beast after all – the fight wouldn't be easy, even with the vessel's odd reluctance to kill his opponents.

When the fifth hour came and saw the full moon at her highest point, he grew restless. They'd been gone for quite some time now. Fights never adhered to specific time frames, of course, but shouldn't they have been back already?

"Fuck this," he hissed when the sixth hour came creeping in with no sight of his team yet. He was going to them and god help them if they'd somehow had killed the Jinchuuriki before they got him to the cave. _He'd be fucking pissed_.

He hadn't done all this work for the rest of them to fuck up and go too far in their bloodthirst!

Grumbling inwardly, he left the cave and slipped into the shadows of the trees, using the moonlight filtering through the leaves to guide his path. He knew where the Hokage had set up camp for the night; he didn't have any part in bringing him down, but he still had needed to know the location in order to estimate how much time it would take the group to reach the cave once they were finished.

He hadn't expected to have to use the knowledge of the location in order to track down his teammates and find out what the hell was taking them so long.

His breath left him in small puffs and he rubbed his hands briskly against each other. He would have to find thicker clothes soon; winter would be soon upon them and he didn't want to freeze his balls off.

The rusty, sickly thick scent of blood greeted him before the sight of the tent did and he pulled a face, cursing the rest of his group. Couldn't they have done this without making so much of a mess? Absent guards or not, people would eventually start noticing that the Hokage was missing and he didn't fancy having any trails lead back to them before they could take on whoever would be send after them.

As he walked closer to the camp site, he became acutely aware of how silent the area was. There was no noise of fighting, nor the obnoxious laughing Saburou tended to do after winning a fight. He couldn't hear Gorou's voice nor Kanae's nasal whine. Just the sound of leaves fluttering in the wind and an owl hooting in the distance.

The lack of noise unsettled him greatly and he slowed down his pace, his fingers slipping around three kunai. Something was _wrong_.

Against his will, his heart started thumping faster; the beat of it loud in his ears and he swallowed, looking around carefully. He couldn't see much; the moonlight didn't reach as deep here as it did in other places of the forest and he didn't dare to light a match before he knew what exactly was going on.

He received his answer as soon as he set foot on the clearing upon which the Hokage had set up camp.

He could only stare in pure horror at the four bodies of his comrades strewn across the forest floor, discarded like broken toys. Kanae was slumped against one of the trees, two shuriken impaling her eyes and a Fūma Shuriken nailed straight through her chest. Both her arms were broken, sticking out at odd angles.

Kaito was just a couple of feet away from her; his throat slit so deeply, it was a mystery how his head was still connected to his body. Multiple shuriken and kunai were deeply embedded in the rest of his body; his blood streaming down like red rivulets from the multiple wounds.

Saburou's own sword had him plastered against a tree; the jagged blade sticking deep in his stomach, nearly cutting him in two. His face was pulled together in a mask of fright as if right before he'd been impaled, he'd seen something terrible.

And Gorou …

Gorou the Giant, the title he'd earnt after beating his opponents with his massive strength, laid just four feet away from the entrance of the tent, sliced open from his stomach to his throat, ending right underneath his chin. His mouth was open in an endless silent scream, his eyes bulging out of their sockets. His blood formed a giant pool underneath him, stinking up the air.

_They were all dead._

Slaughtered like pigs, torn apart like they weren't even human.

How could this … How was this even … But Gorou had said the Jinchuuriki never killed! He never killed, that was why they had all agreed to come along! How could Gorou have been mistaken so badly?

They were all … Everyone was …

He turned around, wanting to get the hell away as soon as possible before he would be next, but froze when instead of meeting nothing but darkness, he stared straight at a glinting, very sharp tip of a blade.

As if in slow motion, he watched with growing horror how someone stepped out of the shadows.

Someone he hadn't even felt the presence of when making his way here. Someone with such an overpowering chakra, he felt like he was going to suffocate any second now, never mind the blade pointed straight at his forehead.

Someone he'd hoped never to cross.

One blazing red eye – the _Sharingan_, the most feared Kekkei Genkai of them all – and one glowing purple one – _Rinnegan_, his mind whispered; recognising it from a book he'd read once, a lifetime ago – pierced straight into his, making him unable to move even though he so badly wanted to.

_He didn't want to die._

"Pl-please, it – it wasn't my idea. I didn't – I just followed G-Gorou," he choked out; fear overpowering him so much he was barely able to string some words together.

_He'd never been so afraid in his life._

"I was wondering when you would come down," the man – the last living Uchiha, the infamous Uchiha Sasuke – murmured, sounding bored. "I was starting to think that I would have to come up and find you myself."

"I'm not – I'll leave. I'll leave and won't ever go near him again! I swear!" Hayato cried desperately and nearly choked on his own tongue when Uchiha's hand shot out and clasped across his mouth, slamming him straight into a tree.

"Don't be so loud; there are people sleeping," Uchiha chided him and then clucked his tongue, looking exasperated. "I've told him again and again that travelling on his own would lead to trouble like this, but do you think that idiot ever listens? Tch, of course he doesn't."

Hayato tried to say he would leave the Hokage be from now on, but could only whimper in pain when fingers tightened around his mouth so hard he feared his jaw would break from the force.

"I'm sure you're sorry about this – that's all I ever hear when I find cockroaches like you," Uchiha said with a cynical smile. "But I can't let you leave. Precautions, you know? Now if you don't mind, it's time for me to finally catch some sleep."

Red and purple flared, silver flashed and –

A dull thump.

Peaceful quiet returned.

* * *

He was jarred out of his sleep when he felt someone crawling into the tent and lay right behind him. He shivered when a cold nose brushed against the back of his neck underneath his hairline.

"You're cold," he said, voice rough with sleep. "Why were you outside?"

"Just keeping watch for a while. Making sure nobody thinks the Hokage travelling alone makes for an easy target."

Blue eyes rolled in exasperation before Naruto twisted around to look at the dark haired man. "Please, like anything is going to happen to me," he said unimpressed. "Kurama keeps an eye out during the night and I've got you. I'm hardly travelling alone, am I?"

"That's not what others think," Sasuke muttered and only now took Naruto notice of the fact that the other man had changed clothes somewhere between them falling asleep and him crawling back into the tent.

He stilled and narrowed his eyes. "Keeping watch, huh?" he said sceptically. "Is that all you did?"

Dark eyes blinked at him innocently. "Of course, why would I lie?"

"So if I go outside now, I won't find any dead bodies?" Naruto asked flatly, his fingers tightening around a cold wrist.

Sasuke lifted an eyebrow before jerking his head at the tent opening. "You can go check if you want. Be my guest," he drawled, looking completely relaxed on the thin sleeping bag.

Naruto stared at him for a while; his eyes flickering to the zipper of the tent sometimes. He was fairly certain that Sasuke had done more than just keeping watch alone, but he hadn't heard anything resembling a fight and aside from Sasuke having changed clothes, he didn't smell like blood either.

"Eugh, whatever, let's go back to sleep," he muttered and turned around again to lie down on his left side. "Get a bit closer, it's cold," he grumbled, waving with his hand behind him.

Sasuke snorted, but obeyed – for once the bastard did something he said – and rested his arm around Naruto's waist.

"Thanks for keeping watch, but you can go to sleep now," Naruto mumbled, his own eyes already falling shut. "Early day and all that jazz."

A low chuckle filled the small space between them before Sasuke's hand slipped underneath his shirt and rested on his stomach, palming the gentle swell that had become palpable over the last month. Soft lips kissed his neck and legs tangled with his own in a move grown familiar after years of being together.

Naruto placed his hand on top of Sasuke's and fell asleep that way, comforted by the protective and warm presence behind him.

Who needed guards when he had Sasuke on his side? He was a much better – and vastly more preferable – shadow than any guard could ever be.

**The End**

* * *

**AN2: As always, probably a weird ending, but that's how my brain works sometimes, I guess. I don't know; still a point of improvement I guess *coughs***

**I hope it wasn't too weird and that you enjoyed reading it at least a little bit! Please leave your thoughts behind in a review; should you spot any mistakes, please point them out to me.**

**I hope to see you back in my other/future stories!**

**Cuddles**

**Melissa**

**P.S. For more information about my upcoming and posted stories, please visit my profile.**


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